


Tear The City Down

by BugTongue



Series: VTM HXH AU [1]
Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Cults, Descent into Madness, Historical Fantasy, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Prophetic Visions, Real World Religions and Historical Tensions, Vampire: The Masquerade - Freeform, Vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 09:02:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29855736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BugTongue/pseuds/BugTongue
Summary: The end of the world has already come for Meteor City, multiple times if you ask the right people, and atop the ruins a new world builds itself up each time. For the cult of Thoth, this is clear. For their teacher, Morena, it is scripture.Kuroro's about to get fucked up by, in no particular order; God, The Abyss, Morena, Pariston, the city of Rome, the concept of mortality, angels, the cracks in his own mind, and last but not least some aggressive kid from Nowhere, Persia.
Relationships: Kuroro Lucifer | Chrollo Lucifer/Genei Ryodan |Phantom Troupe, Morena Prudo & Kuroro Lucifer | Chrollo Lucifer
Series: VTM HXH AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2194998
Comments: 14
Kudos: 7





	Tear The City Down

**Author's Note:**

> If you read all those false start fics for this AU, no you didn't. They will barely tell you anything about what's going to happen, least of all for the next fifty thousand or so words. I promise.
> 
> Thank you to stinkbrat on twitter for the cover art, he drew Kuroro exactly as nervous as he needed to be.
> 
> Here's my playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4ANMmiI0NfVFuDXGFPQA30
> 
> I was initially going to wait until I had all the chapters in this fic finished before posting, but as is clearly evident, I don't have that kind of patience OR self control. Alas. Let's get rolling.

The city aboveground glittered and heaved with the life it contained. Markets with produce and live animals, alleys with dim dealing, and inns with fair drink and unfair games. Regardless of religion and law, too alike to separate from one another and ignored all the same, the world turned as it always had and in likelihood always would. But in these times and in this place, perhaps it was more evident the change of the law and the precarity on which it stood--between wars and the push of each border. The children of Abraham between themselves quarreled, and with the rest of the world they demanded nothing less than full surrender, each with a harsh hand, as if driven on by the other’s demands.

The lady of unknown darkness lay beneath the city, through cracks in the sandstone. She led them here, towards the answers of the true mysteries, real knowledge that was worth far more than any gold from the city or food from the plates of kings, or emperors, or those who claimed to know the very face of Abraham’s God. Down here was the passageway to Thoth’s resting place, where the darkness wrapped around and protected those who still followed his ways and sought to carve his teachings into the hallway rock walls. Their lady Morena was always soft spoken and easy with affection. For one as motherless as Kuroro, she seemed like the shadow of Maut. The soft caress of her hands as she cupped his face settled something in his soul that had been turning over since he was a young child, freshly aware of running naked through the low cities, weaned off stranger’s milk. She was home, and the darkness with her, as Thoth stood unseen somewhere in the shade.

How best to describe this world? Kuroro could stare into the arch of the night sky for hours and never see a hint of the void that lay beneath. No, he supposed it was more akin to the sensation of floating above a deep pit in the sea; that which left him watched and vulnerable. Within the temple of Thoth, beside his teacher, there was safety in that vulnerability but with no absence of predation. The gut acknowledgement of something stalking from the end of each hall. Something lurked there, and always something itched at the very back of his brain. Always there was the curl of incense in those rooms in which torchlight illuminated their papyrus scrolls and stolen chips of tomb paintings. Always there was the curl of something incorrect to the way the lights flickered, shadows in their wake.

The night his temple mother bit her thumb and spread a thimble’s worth against his lip and across his tongue opened his mind in a way that strained its very limits. It left him cracked open at the edges and more tired than he could handle without calling it sickness. All he could think of as he lay shivering and curled in his vermin’s nest in the city was how he wished to go home to his teacher to beg that she make him well again. But that was not the way of Thoth, those powers belonged to one of the forgotten gods Allah chased from the light to skitter as roaches into the crevices and cracks. The one with the wild dogs, the good doctor who’s name Kuroro had forgotten the moment it lost its relevance, would not creep across the ground as sea fog and cure him.

No, he thought it far more likely for Azrael to claim him and cast him below.

\---

Day broke around him in golden rays that warmed his skin and set the pulse of his heart to the back of his eyes, heavy with sleep but indeed still functional. It seemed the angel of death either spared him or did not know his name. Vitality spread from one limb to the next despite the drum beat in his skull, and he wondered if Morena had poison in her veins. He had lapped up a potion of some sort, delivered through her thumb, and accepted the effects that now pushed him from his twisted, dirty blankets.

Early morning, just past dawn. It was no longer the dull blue of those twilit hours but still the city did not stir, used to her long evenings and later nights. The inhabitants of this particular city more so than most others. When Kuroro stood, he found his companions still slumbering about him, undisturbed by his movements and keen to get through the morning the same until the sun came down through the top-most hole in the tarp stretched and staked above their rooftop roost. The sunlight that had woken him came from the burn holes near the floor, an alarm for early risers, whoever the hell they were.

He wrapped himself in the dark grey coat that had once been black, long before he’d gotten his hands on it. He had woven a sandy trim into each edge of the thick fabric, made of the same material as his belt. Today’s task, he decided as he scuffed the calluses of one foot against the stonework beneath, was to find or thieve away a pair of sandals. Wasting time to find water or salve for his cracked feet was beginning to wear on his patience and with the renewed vigor came the desire to evince change. Down the rope ladder with its splintering slats, in through an upper window to the worn-curved stairwell, out into the city below as the first of its risers set about to toss rotten seed to the birds and carry their bundles to market, some of which he scooped out of the dirt and filled the better half of a pocket with. Kuroro’s eyes raked over those dark doorways left behind and noted which ones had other occupants from memory and which ones should lay empty.

An elderly woman stepped out of her house—truly, more of a hut held together by payer and the remnants of wooden apparatus, cleverly placed and secured with mud or reed rope. He didn’t think it likely for her to leave with her face wrapped in thin cloth if she had anyone else to go in her stead, so the moment she turned a corner he let himself in as though he were an old friend.

  
  


The house was dark, but humid with breath and the remnants of a morning wash, heat radiating from the clay oven. To one side was the sheeted figure of a man laying in his bed, and Kuroro stopped in the dim to watch for a moment. A moment more. The figure did not move, and the only thing to disturb the silence were the small sounds of insect wings. His back was to the door as he drew nearer to the still form, and although death never once bothered him previously, he now found the smell of the corpse entirely revolting. Surely this woman was not letting him sit here to decompose, had she no intention of placing him in the ground? Kuroro grit his teeth against the surge of nausea and forced a flit of the eyes downwards to see what adorned his feet.

Sandals. Worn and old, of a style not much in employ these days, but nonetheless they were sturdy and intact. He cast a glance over his shoulder to the door and its single line of window carved beside it, before yanking the sandal straps out of their knots and tucking the collection of reed and leather into his coat. His escape went unnoticed, and no wonder. If a woman needed to be off to market it was unlikely she would come back until she had sold what she could. So, he scurried through the pathways between houses up beyond the edge of the city, over scraggly grasses and shrubbery and into the sand. His feet sunk in deeper the closer he got, but he knew the way with the most rocks to hold his footing steady, and once he was concealed within the shade of the crumbling brickwork, he finally bent to lace his stolen shoes to his feet.

Atop the uppermost curve of stone sat some few ibis, the sacred kind, with their sooty heads and bone-white feathers. They gargled at him and flapped their wings when he pulled himself up to their height, but when he was settled he held out a handful of seed and was rewarded with the right to stroke their warm, bald heads. He liked them most for the way they seemed to enjoy painting their victims toe to tip in bird shit if they were disturbed too suddenly while roosting. Such vain things, he thought, smiling to himself as one nibbed at his fingers until he held tight with his knuckles on either side. Playful and vain, unenthused with the laws or rules of custom, blocking streets and bathing in the holy ablution stands without a single care for who might be next in line.

The sun moved the shade from its previous position and at the sight of approaching figures over the hill, all together the birds stood tall and took to the sky, clear of clouds and hazy at its lowest rim. Kuroro watched them vanish into specks, then hopped down into the entryway where sand swept up against the newly additional wooden door. Acacia bark threaded together and snugged into place to protect the inner chambers from being full up once again with the sands of time. He pulled it from its place, and yanked it back in behind him to allow the darkness to envelope him in cool oblivion.

Incense wafted up from the abyss, and he followed its invisible trail until he found the glow of Morena’s torches, and she sat surrounded in tomes he didn’t recognize. She smiled, soft and sedated, “Come, my dear. Take a seat, and allow me a few moments of instruction before your brothers and sisters arrive.”

\---

Three of them sat in the study room and sought enlightenment in the darkness. Ancient script they had no way of enunciating but which seemed to come more readily to Kuroro now, feeding the itch in the depth of his skull. They were set to translation, pattern recognition mostly, and it was a practice that suited some of them more than others. Two of the girls from his tarp roost sat on tattered sacks stuffed with shreds of cloth too small or misshapen for use elsewhere, to be pulled out for patchwork if needed. They both used serums mysterious in content to him to lighten their hair, a more difficult feat for Machi than for Pakunoda. The latter had forward curved features and hair of a light brown at its roots, which shone gold in the torchlight where she had lightened them. Machi had the same color hair as he still wore, but now seemed to have been washed out and replaced with some color rendered from cactus blooms. They wore thin veils only to protect from the sand while out, just as mismatched and ill fitting to their surrounding cultures as anyone else who came to the temple. In there, they were all as bare faced and bare topped as one another to survive the stuffy heat of the fires lit for reading as well as the summer scorch that radiated from the ceiling and washed in when the temple door was shifted around.

A warm breeze caused the lights to flicker, something that caught Kuroro’s attention as their usual flickers came more from invisible means. Uvogin must be back from the shattered tomb sitting out at the edge of a dead oasis. A crater where there had once been a lush spring, but now softened and filled with sand nearly fit to cover the top of the tomb as well. Uvo wasn't built for the tight passageways, but he was the only one able to haul back pieces of the structure itself for the rest of them to puzzle over. A few moments later he emerged into their study with a stack of thumb-thick bricks. He was slick with sweat in such a way that caused his black hair to glisten as though full of stars, and his breath came in large heaves once he sat them on the much larger bricks that approximated a table.

“Welcome back, Uvo,” Morena’s voice drifted to him long before her gaze followed. Kuroro suspected she should have an opium pot on her, but had never seen her partake. “There is wine in the red room. Roman merchant ship, so more water than wine really.”

“Cheap bastards wouldn’t sell the good shit even to a sultan unless he went over himself.” He wiped a hand over his face and leaned back against the cool stone wall, cooler at least than the heat of his skin. “You kids make any progress?”

“I’m older than you.” Paku pulled the pins out of her hair where they had begun to loosen, and put them back in place until the strands no longer fell into her face.

“How do you even know?”

“Don’t I act like it?” She smiled and caught the pebble thrown at her head.

The bickering seemed to take the crease between Machi’s brow and cause it to grow, until she finally rubbed at her eyes and tucked her scroll into its protective tube. “I’m seeing double anyway, lets find out just how much wine there is to those barrels.” She turned to Kuroro with the heavy, dead eyed stare she so often affected.

He opened his mouth to speak, but felt his head tug a measure to the side to make eye contact with his teacher. She tilted her head, hair more pale than milk and curling down from the crown of thorns constantly affixed to her head. When she stood, he knew, somehow, that he was meant to follow her, and it took a great effort to turn back to his friend. “Go ahead, I’ll find my own later if I feel like it.”

“Suit yourself.” She walked past him slow enough to rake her fingers through his hair once, neck to the top of his skull just to make it stand on end. A shared smile and she vanished beyond the threshold.

Kuroro sat there as the smoke from the incense and the torches mingled on their way along the same path as his companions. “… Teacher, what do you wish from me?” ‘What poison did you administer last night,’ He asked only the questions he thought would get answers, and not those which might imply a lack of trust—something truly valued in these slums.

“I’d like to show you something. There are more to these ruins than crumbling bricks and bird shit, I think you are nearly ready to see it. Rise.” He kept his gaze on the swirling smoke and its sooty remnants upon the walls as he pushed himself to his feet. It was never him with the gut feelings on things and he was struck with the sudden intense desire to call Machi to his side. _Come back, my friend, do not leave me alone in the dark_. His lips stuck shut with the glue of thirst, and his eyes flickered to Morena in surprise when she approached too silently to follow beforehand. As the night before, she pricked her thumb on the thorns above her heatwave eyes and held it out for him until the blood ran down her wrist.

He felt his lips unstick and a distracting need urged him forward to lap it up, licking the bone of her wrist first, then up through the divot of her palm to close his lips around her thumb. He was unaware of himself when he bit down, but even if he were aware of the greed in his stomach he would never think to ignore it. In fact, he only stopped when he found himself arched backwards by the hair, mouth hinged open fully and his hazy eyes watching the flickering ceiling. He licked the coppery flavor from his lips when she let him go, and drew in a shallow breath. “Curious.”

“It’s a gift. Come,” She stroked his cheek with a now entirely healed hand, and he never spared a thought to disobey as she led him past the room his companions were rummaging through.

\---

They walked down the halls which had always watched him before, now welcoming him deeper as though recognizing a friend. They brought no torchlight with them, fumbling into deeper and deeper darkness until the air grew truly still. Kuroro found himself terribly unnerved as the sensation of welcome gave way to the much less comfortable one of standing under a new moon, surrounded by guttering lions. It seemed for so long that his eyes would never adjust to the darkness as there was no light to adjust to, but ever gradually grey shapes could be made out. Outlines, back-lit by some ambient moonlight a thousand sky-lengths away. There could be no light, there was no source, not at his feet nor off into the unseen distance, but as he stared more intently he found he was able to make sense of those shapes.

Alarm churned his guts as he saw others in the eternal night engulfing them. Drifting over a deep pit in the sea. Buried alive. His breath came faster and stuck high in his throat, panic and sickness overtaking him. He must have followed her for much longer than it took to walk home from the temple, but it felt like moments even the sand couldn't record. “Teacher, where the fuck are we?”

“The temple, still. We have simply moved beyond the reach of any light the world could produce.”

“I can see.”

“Good. You don’t want to be here do you.”

“I find it difficult to believe you do.” That was untrue, actually, upon further thought this place seemed rather fitting for Morena. “Where are we?”

“The darkness. Can you feel it?” She turned to him, and he looked up into her face to see the gnarled scars over one eye, hairline to her soft jaw. The eyes however, were very wrong. Just the slightest hint of that flash of the mirrors he’s seen in the night desert, prowling between buildings when the city was truly asleep before sunrise. “I will tell you more of this place the next time we visit. For now, I have something to attend to; Return.”

Kuroro did not have control over his own actions and Morena be damned, he obeyed, teeth gnashing furiously as the pressing shadows licked his skin. There was no wind but his hair was brushed loose across his forehead just as his clothing was whipped about his form. The darkness ripped at him as if refusing to see him gone, but the moment he saw the warm burn of the wine room he scrambled faster out of the sloping hallway. When he burst into the room, his companions ceased what had been enthusiastic laughter. Paku wiped a tear from her eye and took Kuroro in with dawning confusion, worry. “Kuroro?”

“I would like to leave, if you don’t mind. Oh,” He clutched his stomach and heaved until his meal from the day previous came up and splattered the stones, devoid of any copper tinge. “Now.”

\---

He had needed to be carried back to the roost and folded, shivering, into his filthy bedding to sweat out the effects of whatever Morena had given him. As he lay there lost in a heatless fever, his eyes rolled in their sockets, mind replaying the terrifying events prior. A thatch of seaweed in a night ocean grabbed at his ankles to drown him, the dark of a cavern crushed him to dust, blood poured from the walls and down his throat until he ran out of breath in his lungs.

He woke drowning, arms ripping the sheets apart and teeth gnashing into the sack of dirt beneath his head. Furiously ill, confused in the darkness until someone held him down and blew cool breath over his sweating face. Slowly the dream subsided and allowed the clouds to part, revealing the present. Someone muttered the name of a god they didn’t believe in and asked for the blessing of his silence while he slowly made out the shape of his friend above him. “Uvo-” He gasped the word and tried to reach towards him but was held fast. “I’m awake. Uvo.”

“Jesus Christ, boss.”

He allowed Kuroro to sit up and rest his head against one bare pectoral muscle until he’d caught his breath. “I’m sorry”

“You can say you're sorry by stealing something from the docks for me later, first of all what the hell is wrong with you lately?” There had been deaths like this in living memory, the fevers that took hold of a person and wrung them like a rag until they died with their stomachs in their mouths. He was scaring them.

“It’s difficult to explain. I ask you all not to worry.” He lifted his head, and this time the darkness was mostly expelled by the nearly full moon illuminating their tarp. “I may need to sleep alone if this persists, however.”

They sat up together long enough for Kuroro to cotton to the fact they had not been sleeping, but sitting with him while the sounds of human nightlife churned below. His brow ticked, they shouldn't care so much about his survival that they waste their time watching over his sleeping form. That wasn't how they did things--they were nobodies, even to themselves. The idea wasn't something as simple as absurdity, it was dangerous.

"... I'm going out, carry on." He got to his feet on weak knees and pushed the hands off that reached to steady him. "Hm, none of that. I'm fine."

"With every intent of insult, you look like shit." Machi's glaring eyes glittered in the moonlight, but the curve of her mouth betrayed worry above the annoyance.

"Then I shall seek a cure. I should be back by morning, don't wait for me." He secured his belt and pushed his way through the flaps of their tarp, taking care on the rope ladder so his unsteady limbs would not send him to his death. Gradually the annoyance withered in the face of longing, pure desire to return to the temple and its strange horror. Was it curiosity? A lack of survival instinct? Whatever it was powered him through the night market and her drunks onwards across the illuminated sand, back to his teacher.

He pulled the door aside and looked into pitch black nothingness. Not a torch, not a candle, not a spark. But he knew she was there within. In the pit of his gut he could feel the pull to her arms, her presence, and it made him feel that surging strength again that came after the sickness last time. He stepped inside, and allowed the great calling of souls to lead him through the sightless passage. "Teacher. Morena. Where are you?"

"Here, child. What do you seek?" The soft voice and billowing scent of rotten lilies poured over him from behind. He didn't bother to turn around.

"You've done something to me, made me ill. Why?"

"I don't need to tell you that, not for a very long time. Now tell me, what do you _seek_?"

"You." Now he did turn and reach out for her in the dark, only to grab at air. "You, I couldn't stay away. You've put me under a spell, poisoned me, haven't you? Is this something Thoth has taught you, something you keep secret from your lowly students?"

He startled when a cool hand grabbed him by the face and shoved him backward into the bricks. Held with his mouth covered by marble palm; cool and unforgiving. A change from the softness he remembered, and still he found his tongue out against her palm. “You creatures are always so eager, all it takes is a taste, really. You want more, that's all, isn't that right?”

“Maybe I do,” He felt alive, dead, alive, and so focused on her presence in this eternal night. “Mh-”

With a rushing sound in his ears, the darkness rushed in, pouring into his brain until he could no longer form coherent thought. He was drowning and lost in the sea. His hands came up to scrabble at her arm, useless nails doing nothing but scrape off of her as though mere caresses. "Ngh, stop, tell it to stop."

"How am I to know what you mean, darling?" Her voice was the only clear thing as he began to tremble, vision coming to him in the form of swirling tendrils of that familiar backlit grey. 

Then things changed. Out of the abyss came the face of a man, young and old at once, morphing as tho between both ends of metamorphosis. It faded into the scent of blood, dew on grass, a burning, brutal sunlight between motionless branches of palm and olive. There was something wrong about their stillness but he was onto the next sensation. Wet pavement. Too tight for his own body, full to the brim. Once again too much light, far too much, and he called out to the only god he knew who should be responsible for such a thing.

At once, Morena was gone. The stone temple was gone. He stood swaying in the desert with residual awe, vision still burned out by what- whoever had led him back to the surface.

\---

He didn't go home.

_Blinding light swayed in ribbons across the desert, It had spoken to him. Uttered words like a chant that set his heart beating faster and faster until he could not breathe, could not think, could not see._

He couldn't. Something beyond his own mind compelled him to flee as far and as soon as he was fucking able, and by the gods, any of the gods, he was not to argue.

Instead, he pulled someone between houses and sliced them open before they could ever hope to know their fate. The smell of alcohol wreathed them as he relieved them of their valuables, most notably their bag, and licked his hands clean of the blood that so generously coated them. Not a drop in sight remained but he still used his dark sleeve to wipe any remaining evidence from his face.

_His teacher’s face contorting in bared teeth, canines sharp as needles and extended, and eyes that narrowed into bottomless slits. She shrank from the light. She left Kuroro alone with it._

It was easy to find a ship that was bound across the sea, less so to find one which would let him in particular aboard. He and his fellows were not unknown to this city nor her ports. But money was the oil of the world's gears, and on he got--nothing to his name and no one to know where he had gone.

Already the loss of them wounded him, but he could not stop nor slow. He needed to leave before the fear of not doing so consumed him. He could feel it even now. There was an itch in his veins that begged him to return to those unlit corridors of course, but something far more primal urged him on until the rise of land was visible over the waves.

The Kingdom of Sicily, new hunting grounds for someone of his ilk, and a refuge if he could keep his head down long enough.

_Sunflower seeds scattered in the blood-soaked earth. Torn banners--blue, gold, the meeting of clear sky and glorious sun. Burn. Burning. Burnt. Hollowed out and hallowed to nothing, a dark smear of grease across the heavens._

_Seeds in blood-soaked earth grow to reach the sun--_

_\--and blot it out._


End file.
